Criticism

Volume 58 | Issue 1 Article 8

2016 The Life and Death of Sexual Difference Louis van den Hengel Maastricht University, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation van den Hengel, Louis (2016) "The Life and Death of Sexual Difference," Criticism: Vol. 58 : Iss. 1 , Article 8. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol58/iss1/8 THE LIFE AND In Becoming Undone, Elizabeth Grosz connects ’s DEATH OF SEXUAL account of biological evolution as DIFFERENCE an unpredictable and open-ended Louis van den Hengel process of variation to the phi- losophies of , Gilles Becoming Undone: Darwinian Deleuze, and in Reflections on Life, Politics, and order to elaborate a more or less Art by Elizabeth Grosz. Durham, neomaterialist ontology of sexual NC: Press, difference as the engine of natu- 2011. Pp. 264. $84.95 cloth; $23.95 ral existence, the vital mechanism paper. productive of the complexity and excesses of life as we may or may not know it. The book is set over and against what Grosz perceives as a postmodern feminism in which notions of nature and matter have been sidelined, and where, more precisely, ontological inquiries into the constitution of life have been subsumed under epistemologi- cal considerations of how bodies come to matter exclusively in terms of language, discourse, and cul- ture. Grosz, in contrast, develops a Darwinian feminism and a post- modern Darwinism that attempts to rethink the materiality of sexual difference through the inhuman time of evolutionary becoming. Whereas feminist theorists have generally been reluctant to engage with Darwinian thought beyond the scope of epistemological cri- tique, Grosz’s work takes a differ- ent and more affirmative approach. The aim of Becoming Undone is not to address the androcentrism apparent in Darwin’s theory of evo- lution, nor to assess the essentialist approaches to sexual and racial

Criticism Winter 2016, Vol. 58, No. 1, pp. 153–162. ISSN 0011-1589. doi: 10.13110/criticism.58.1.0153 153 © 2017 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

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differences within neo-Darwinian folded into matter as the potential sociobiology or evolutionary psy- to become different. This nonteleo- chology, but rather to take hold of logical reading of Darwin is directly what in Darwin’s work is useful for opposed to the traditions of social the elaboration of feminist thought Darwinism that tend to reduce all beyond postmodern theories of evolutionary mechanisms to the power and difference, and past the teleological principle of survival—a limits of egalitarian politics of rec- reduction that has on more than one ognition. Against this background, occasion facilitated a classification Grosz advances a philosophy of of humanity as the pinnacle of cre- life and matter as deeply attuned ation that runs counter to Darwin’s not only to each other but to the own work. Indeed, Grosz posits a generative force of duration—the fundamental continuity between becoming and unbecoming— individuals and species of all kinds, through which biological evolution not because they share a common proceeds as an open-ended process genealogy, but because all of life is of differentiation, especially sexual enjoined in the transformation of differentiation. matter. Grosz’s Darwinism, then, Starting from the basic is a highly Deleuzian one in which Darwinian insight that the differ- evolution is construed as a trans- ences between humans and other versal force of creative transforma- animal species, as well as among tion, an impersonal cut across the human beings, are differences in boundaries between organic and degree and not in kind, Grosz uses inorganic vitality, an unpredictable the philosophies of Bergson and and increasingly complex elabora- Deleuze to theorize evolutionary tion of life as the power to differ. emergence not merely as a rela- If, as Deleuze has suggested, tion between different forms of “Darwin’s great novelty was that life but as a dynamic entanglement of inaugurating the thought of between life and the inorganic individual difference,”1 Grosz forces of matter. Life and matter seizes upon Darwin’s idea that it are conceptualized not as binary is sexual difference, in the form of opposites but as divergent tenden- sexual selection, through which cies or trajectories, two different life first elaborates itself as a con- degrees of the same, ever-differing, tinuous process of variation and force of duration: the temporal or creative excess. It is through her evolutionary impulse that enables philosophical exploration of the life to actualize the “vital indeter- relation between sexual and natu- minacy” (34) of the material world ral selection in Darwin’s writings, from which it emerges, to unfold and her subsequent elaboration the dynamic unpredictability that is of a dynamic ontology of sexual

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divergence, that Grosz’s Darwin increasingly mundane fashion, emerges not only as a decisive feminist scholarship from the 1990s theorist of becoming, but—unwit- onwards. Grosz, however, hardly tingly—as “the first feminist of engages with any of the new mate- difference” (142). As unexpected a rial feminisms that have emerged designation this may be for some- as a response to this call, which is one whose vision of evolution regu- one of the reasons why, although larly attests to the biological and I am fully committed to what she social inferiority of women, and has called the “forgotten question of whose personal views about sexual ontology,”3 I remain unconvinced difference may be summed up by by the rhetorical gestures that a calculated list of marriage’s pros underpin the urgency with which and cons describing female com- that question is posed. There are panionship as slightly preferable to few specific references to feminist owning a dog,2 Grosz convincingly scholarship in Becoming Undone, shows how Darwin’s open-ended and Grosz’s repeated criticisms understanding of nature and mat- of “feminist egalitarianism” and ter as constitutive of vital transfor- “postmodern feminism” are not mations may become central to the substantiated by in-depth readings elaboration of a nonanthropocen- of whatever theorists are supposed tric feminism of difference, a “new to be filed under these extremely kind of feminism” (57) that reworks elastic concepts. The book as a the problem of sexual difference in whole lacks much of the meticulous the bio-ontological context of “ani- engagement with mal becomings and the becomings that characterized Grosz’s earliest microscopic and imperceptible that work. The assertion that “concepts regulate matter itself” (86). of autonomy, agency, and freedom Like in her previous work, . . . are continuously evoked in fem- Grosz frames the invocation of the inist theory” but “have been rarely concepts of nature, matter, and life defined, explained, or analyzed” as a turn—or return—to a “more (59), for example, is overly gener- archaic” but also “more modern- alized at best, while observations ist” tradition that has been largely about feminism’s “submersion in neglected in feminist theory (59). the politics of representation” (85) The call to reclaim matter—not and “the overwhelming dominance the materiality of the body, but the of identity politics” (89) sound curi- biological dynamism from which ously quaint in light of Grosz’s own all bodies emerge—from its per- insistence, in the same chapter, ceived absence in feminist theory that what is principally at stake in after the cultural turn is of course ­feminist theory is the invention of not new, but has pervaded, in an the new.

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If Becoming Undone provides work by reading it as a Deleuzian a foundation for future femi- feminist analysis of difference nist thought, it is not through its avant la lettre. More importantly, account of recent feminist history, the notion of sexual selection in but by means of Grosz’s interpreta- her view explains the persistence tion of evolutionary theory as a way of sexual difference as an ontologi- to rethink the materiality of sexual cal force in the evolution of life. It difference as an entanglement of— is at this point, argues Grosz, that rather than interaction between— “feminists who are committed to the biological, the cultural, and the the concept of the irreducible dif- social.4 To this end, Grosz revisits ference between the sexes,” such Irigaray’s conception of sexual dif- as Irigaray, “may find in Darwin’s ference—as an irreducible ontolog- writings surprising confirmation ical difference—through­ Darwin’s of their claims” (156). This is a account of sexual selection. Darwin compelling statement, and yet the introduced the concept of sexual interweaving of Irigaray’s ontol- selection in part to explain the ori- ogy of sexual difference with a gins of phenomena that cannot Deleuzian–Darwinian under- be attributed to natural selection, standing of evolution is not with- such as the differences in appear- out problems. The most important ance between male and female ani- difficulties, in my view, arise from mals, the operations of erotic appeal Grosz’s tendency to contain the and attraction, and the presence of vital indeterminacy of matter—its beauty in the natural world. Sexual infinite potential for change and selection hence accounts for the evo- transformation—within a binary of lution of features without any par- sexual difference that is understood ticular survival value, such as large as ontologically impossible to over- antlers or ornate peacock feathers, come. Since, as Grosz has claimed which are primarily directed to the elsewhere, “sexual selection differ- attainment of sexual partners. Since entiates all species touched by its sexual selection is independent from trace with an irreducible binarism the logic of reproduction—even if it that itself generates endless variety may lead to reproductive success— on either side of its bifurcation,”5 Grosz views it as a strategy to maxi- life on earth in her view consists in mize difference or variation itself, the elaboration of multiple lines of to proliferate differences for the development that cannot proceed sake of beauty and pleasure alone, without the irreducible existence for the intensification of nothing of at least two types of being. Yet if but pure difference. physical forms of evolution occur Grosz thus acknowledges a through the nonteleological force rich feminist potential in Darwin’s of duration, and if sexual selection

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is governed not by sexual reproduc- determined and yet do not exactly tion but by the unpredictable forces constitute the biology of sexual dif- of aesthetic choice and appeal, why ference.”8 In this way, Grosz’s neo- does Grosz need to posit an irre- materialist philosophy of life in its ducible ontological binarism as the virtual multiplicity, its openness sine qua non of biological and cul- to “the irresistible future of sexual tural differentiation? difference” (101), paradoxically In fact, Grosz’s own neomate- ends up denying the unpredictable rialist Darwinism—if taken to its nature of sexual evolution. logical conclusion—would seem That Grosz, in light of the end- to imply a rather opposite under- less variation generated through standing of sexual difference as a sexual difference as an evolutionary process of ontological differentia- force, continues to cast this differ- tion irreducible to any sexual bina- ence in terms of ontological duality rism. Grosz a priori rejects this rather than irreducible multiplic- view,6 which leads to a curiously ity cannot be divorced from her unresolved tension between her concentration on the later work open-ended reading of evolution- of Irigaray. As many critics have ary unfolding on the one hand and noted, Irigaray’s oeuvre is split her affirmation of the ontomateri- into an earlier phase and a later ality of binary sexual difference on phase: whereas the former devel- the other. The crucial point here, as ops a fluid philosophy of difference Luciana Parisi has astutely noted, is as not-One, the latter asserts the that if the evolution of sex is truly duality of sexual difference at the considered as a form of process— increasing expense of sexual and that is, if it is conceptualized from natural multiplicity.9 More impor- a radical empiricist perspective— tantly, this later work affirms what then “the biological formation of Rosi Braidotti has called “the meta- two sexes may coincide not with physics of two” from a distinctly the ontological duration of sexual heterosexual, or at least hetero- difference but . . . with an accident, social, perspective.10 In I Love to an event in evolution.”7 By ground- You (1996), for example, Irigaray ing the becoming and unbecoming unambiguously positions the male– of life in a model of two irreduc- female relationship as the paradig- ible sexes, Grosz fails to attend not matic model for the “mysterious” to the potentially infinite expres- force of sexual difference, and even sions of sexual difference per se, turns the heterosexual couple into but to the myriad forms of sex that the privileged site for the devel- run beneath the figure of the two, opment of ethical social relations, the “infinitesimal number of dif- feminist politics, and the creativ- ferential sexes that are completely ity of life itself.11 Although Grosz,

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with Irigaray, acknowledges that cannot be adequately addressed sexual difference cannot be con- through the notion of sexual differ- tained within the sexual identities ence as “(at least) two” (104). And of male and female as they are pres- while it may be the case that Grosz ently lived or actualized, she seems uses this remarkably parenthetical to take no issue with the latter’s phrase, which recurs throughout conviction that the affirmation of her work, to release some of the sexual difference, if it is to be truly tensions inherent in the encoun- ethical, “will come from the evolu- ter between Darwin and Irigaray, tion, the revolution in the relations Becoming Undone makes painfully between man and woman, first and clear that “(at least) two” does not a foremost in the couple.”12 Becoming multiplicity make. Undone instead takes the bifurca- The limits of Grosz’s account tion between male and female, of sexual difference become read- effected through sexual selection, ily apparent in her discussion of as the primary mechanism through the objections against Irigaray by which the evolution of life proceeds Drucilla Cornell and Judith Butler. in “two different incalculable direc- The latter in particular points to tions” (141). the “presumptive heterosexual- I do not want to imply at this ity” in Irigaray’s conception of point that Grosz’s conception of the ethical exchange, which not only natural as “never one but always privileges the sexual over all other at least two” (149) reproduces­ forms of difference but also, as ­normative heterosexuality at the already noted, frames the genera- ontomaterial level of life itself. The tive interval of sexual difference problem rather lies in the residual through a most narrow version of organicism of Grosz’s concep- heterosexual relationality.14 Grosz tion of evolution. It is precisely does not provide a direct answer to the extent that Grosz locates to Butler’s concern that Irigaray the force of sexual difference in denies the existence of ethically the complexification of organic enabling differences within same- life that her attachment to a late-­ sex relationships, but points out Irigarayan ontology of sexual dif- that all sexual relations—no matter ference—perceived as a duality how queer—are affected by sexual that “inscribes finitude in the natu- difference. While this in principle ral itself”13—closes down what her acknowledges same-sex relations as Deleuzian reading of Darwin had a locus for the affirmation of sexual so creatively opened up: the infinite alterity—a much-needed supple- potentiality of matter to unfold a ment to Irigaray—it also leads to a qualitative multiplicity of sexes, curious confession on Grosz’s part: a proliferation of sex events that “I cannot see,” she writes, “how an

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understanding of sexuality, sexual dangerously close to the transpho- pleasure, desire, and identity can be bic assumption that trans individ- developed which doesn’t discern, as uals may look like “real” men or part of its very operations, the rela- women, but can never actually be tive values of and attraction to the the sex with which they identify. particularities of male and female Equally problematic are Grosz’s bodies, organs, and activities” (108). claims about nontraditional fam- Unfortunately, this failure to envi- ily arrangements, which under the sion sexual difference beyond a pervasive impact of sexual differ- binary frame subsequently trans- ence in her view inevitably take lates into a number of contentious a heterosexual form: “The roles claims about how sexual difference, of mommy and daddy are perpe- as a constitutive difference, suppos- trated even within gay families,” edly operates in relation to sex, gen- according to Grosz, “although it der, and sexuality. is no longer clear that the mommy The full weight of the paren- is a woman and the daddy is a thetical “(at least) two” comes to man” (108). While this argument bear on Grosz’s interpretation of willfully ignores the possibility intersexuality and transsexuality. that queer forms of kinship may While the former is simply dis- transform rather than reproduce missed as confirming rather than the nuclear family model, it also challenging the binary nature of remains curiously anthropocentric sexual difference, Grosz considers in light of Grosz’s own Darwinian the latter as—quoting Irigaray— interpretation of sexual difference. the “new opium for the people” Even when we leave aside that (110). Indeed, she insists that two-parent families are largely “however queer, transgendered absent in nonhuman nature, where [sic], and ethnically identified one single parenting or the absence might be, one comes from a man of any parental investment is the and a woman, and one remains norm,15 it remains entirely unclear a man or a woman, even in the how the reproduction of gender case of gender-reassignment or roles rooted in human sociality the chemical and surgical trans- would testify to the ontological formations of one sex into the persistence of sexual difference as appearance of another” (109–10). a nonhuman force. This remarkably strong statement That Grosz refers to Darwinian not only suggests that sexual dif- sexual selection as “the queering ference is controlled by bodily of natural selection” (132) diffuses difference—a view inconsistent rather than solves the problem. with the work of either Irigaray While Grosz interestingly places or Grosz herself—but also comes a queer intensification of bodies

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at the heart of her ­neomaterialist such reductive textual oppositions, reading of sexual evolution, the for Hemmings, is their amenability strong association of this queerness­ to the highly problematic framing with the “skills of spectacular per- of the sexual in broader postfemi- formance” (125)—the “noisy color- nist and antifeminist discourses fulness” and “artistic excessiveness” far beyond their own theoretical (126) of the most attractive mem- location. bers of a particular species—is not To be clear, I do not want to theoretically innocent. In effect, suggest that Grosz’s evolution- the naming of sexual selection as ary narrative serves to set queer queer potentially reinforces the theory against neomaterialist stereotypical association of queer- feminism—after all, whether ness—and queer theory—with the her work has this or precisely the conceptually frivolous and politi- opposite effect surely depends cally unproductive spaces of gender on the reader. Nevertheless, the performativity, erotic pleasure, and aforementioned examples are aesthetic display. The establish- revealing of the tensions not ment of such links between queer only between the Deleuzian– theory and frivolity is actually Darwinian and Irigarayan strands central to what Clare Hemmings in Grosz’s work, but more gener- has perceptively called the “politi- ally between feminist new mate- cal grammar” of much contem- rialism and queer criticism within porary feminist theory, especially contemporary philosophies of those narratives that, like Grosz’s, life. By reading Grosz’s compel- reclaim a “forgotten” material- ling turn towards the evolution ity or ontology in order to move of life and matter in light of the beyond the textual abstractions of genealogy of feminist theory and the cultural turn.16 Since such nar- its discontents, I have attempted ratives are generally marked by an to show how the commitment to overassociation of cultural theory an irreducible binarism of sexual with sexual critique, as Hemmings difference, in tandem with an demonstrates in admirable detail, affirmation of difference as the they problematically position generative force of the living and queer theory—often in the person nonliving universe, both invokes of Butler—as “the quintessential and disavows the existence of a opposite” of feminist new materi- natural multiplicity—a biologi- alism, an “anachronistic interrup- cal queerness, perhaps—that is tion” that needs to be overcome in just as sexually specific and just order to regain feminist commit- as real, both phenomenologically ment and political credibility.17 One and ontologically, as the nature of of the most pernicious effects of sexual duality.

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Grosz’s work generously NOTES ­provides the reader with potential 1. , Difference and ways out of the dilemmas posed by Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, Athlone its own contradictions, and perhaps Contemporary European Thinkers this testifies to its conceptual vitality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 248. and strength. Although Becoming Undone ultimately does not quite 2. For the latter, see Nora Barlow, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin develop a philosophy of sexual dif- 1809–1882: With the Original Omissions ference as a force of irreducible Restored (London: Collins, 1958), multiplicity—the crossing over of 231–34. sex into what Deleuze and Guattari 3. Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: describe as “molecular assemblages Feminism, Nature, Power, Next Wave: 18 New Directions in Women’s Studies of a different nature” —it is cer- (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, tainly possible to make the frictions 2005), 172. in Grosz’s work productive to that 4. It is important not to reduce Grosz’s end. If Grosz’s theorization of the argument to the straw (wo)man life of sexual difference as an ongo- fallacies that are used to sustain it. At this point, I disagree with Sara ing process of human and nonhu- Ahmed’s claim that Grosz’s return to man becomings will eventually lead the “forgotten” issue of nature depends to the death of sexual difference as on the “forgetting” of previous feminist scholarship on the biological (Sara a philosophical concept, then this is Ahmed, “Imaginary Prohibitions: Some a death only in the most generative Preliminary Remarks on the Founding sense: not in terms of a metaphys- Gestures of the ‘New Materialism,’” European Journal of Women’s Studies ics of finitude, but as another phase 15, no. 1 [2008]: 23–39, quotations on in an enduring process of material 27). In Grosz’s view, it is not biology, as and conceptual transformation. such, but the ontological inseparability of The death of sexual difference in the biological and all other spheres of life that has been left out in postmodern this view consists only and precisely feminist theory, which conceptualizes in its emergence, or reemergence, as nature and culture, mind and matter, as a vital force of qualitative multiplic- two distinct interacting categories. ity, an immanent flow of sexual dif- 5. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: fering in its infinite complexity. Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 67. Louis van den Hengel is assistant professor 6. Grosz in fact turns Irigaray’s notion at the Department of Literature and Art of sexual difference as a “lived and the Centre for Gender and Diversity at universal” into the precondition for her Maastricht University. His current research neomaterialist reading of evolutionary examines the relations between affect, theory: “It is only to the extent that materiality, and time in contemporary per- feminism is committed to the primacy formance art, and focuses on the work of the of sexual difference that the value and Serbian and New York–based artist Marina significance of Darwin’s conception Abramović. of sexual selection can be appreciated

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and the reductive impulses of social the ethical limitations of same-sex Darwinism resisted” (117). relations is equally unambiguous: “Engaging with a person of my own 7. Luciana Parisi, “Event and Evolution,” gender is threatened with superficiality, Southern Journal of Philosophy 48, dissolution, with an unethical sensibility Spindel Supplement (2010): 147–64, as long as there are no just institutions quotation on 153. appropriate to it. That is not the case 8. Ibid., 154–55. with a gender different from mine, not because of natural attraction and 9. Irigaray considers the notion of reproduction . . . but more because multiplicity not as opposed to but of the creativity difference produces” complicit with the violent logic of (Irigaray, I Love to You, 146). sameness, and even claims that, beyond its basis in the irreducibility between 12. Irigaray, I Love to You, 26. the two sexes, “multiplicity is likely to 13. Ibid., 35. lead to death” (Luce Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity within History, 14. Judith Butler, in Pheng Cheah and trans. Alison Martin [New York: Elizabeth Grosz, “The Future of Routledge, 1996], 143). See also Pheng Sexual Difference: An Interview with Cheah and Elizabeth Grosz, “Of Being- Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell,” Two: Introduction,” Diacritics 28, no. 1 Diacritics 28, no. 1 (1998): 19–42, (1998): 3–18. quotation on 26. 10. Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On 15. Myra J. Hird, “Animal Trans,” in Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Queering the Non/Human, ed. Noreen Polity Press, 2006), 117. Giffney and Myra J. Hird, Queer Interventions (Aldershot, England: 11. For Irigaray, lesbian and homosexual Ashgate, 2008), 227–47. love clearly fall short in their potential to realize the “fecundity” of sexual 16. Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: difference. In an interview quoted by The Political Grammar of Feminist Grosz (101), Irigaray asserts that “man Theory, Next Wave: New Directions in and woman is the most mysterious Women’s Studies (Durham, NC: Duke and creative couple. That isn’t to say University Press, 2011). that other couples may not also have 17. Ibid., 118, 120. a lot in them, but man and woman is the most mysterious and creative” 18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, (Kiki Amsberg and Aafke Steenhuis, A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and “An Interview with Luce Irigaray,” Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi Hecate 9, nos. 1–2 [1983]: 192–202, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota quotation on 199). Irigaray’s view on Press, 1987), 213.

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